4. Chapter 4
Mara
The tree outside the window casts shadows on the ceiling.
I have been staring at them for twenty-six minutes.
The vent by the baseboard has gone quiet, but that is not going to help me sleep.
I roll onto my side. I roll onto my back.
I do this thing where I think about other places I have not slept.
The studio in Charlotte, the week I drove down to Hannah’s because I could not be in D.C.
for one more hour. The couch in my college friend Becca’s apartment, the first night after the complaint, when she still returned my texts.
The futon in the agency-provided extended stay in Boston for three weeks before this job opened up.
I have not slept well in fourteen months.
Technically, I’m an experienced sleeper of foreign rooms.
But the rooms before this were rooms I was passing through.
The bed under me right now is a bed I have signed a six-month contract to sleep in.
I have unpacked one suitcase into the dresser.
The work shoes for tomorrow are by the door.
There is a tablet on the nightstand with Owen’s morning schedule on it.
I am supposed to be here for six months.
I am also, less than a day into the job, lying in the dark thinking about my employer’s forearms.
The two facts are sitting in my chest at the same time and they will not negotiate.
I think about Dr. Carras. The coffee shop in Dupont where she advised me to take a job that gives me a room and a routine and a year off the radar. The quiet agency, the clean placement, the trim summary that is not a lie and is also not the whole truth.
Cole does not know about Dr. Carras. He knows what the agency told him. He does not know the shape of what the trim summary becomes when a lawyer with subpoena power reads it.
I heard the call through the vent.
A guardianship filing is exactly the kind of thing where the wrong person reads the file.
I press my hands against my stomach.
I should leave.
I should not leave. I cannot afford to leave. The agency placed me at a rate I am not going to find again for months.
My sister Hannah lives in Charlotte. She is never going to mention her medical bill to me, but I know about it. I have done the math on this job, and the math is the only reason I am here.
I am going to stay.
I am going to stay, and I am going to do the work, and I am going to keep my hands flat against my stomach over the t-shirt because the man I overheard on the phone is not a man I am allowed to want.
The hands do not stay flat.
It is one in the morning and the house is quiet and my body is on its own schedule.
I think about the kitchen. The way he laid out Owen’s routine like it was already settled, the quarter-hour blocks, the color-coding, talking over me like I was a thing to be briefed instead of the person who’d be running it.
The way I pushed back. The way I held the line until he gave me the half-inch of ground that meant I’d won.
I won that argument. I know I won it.
And I’m still lying here thinking about his forearms like the winning didn’t count for anything.
A man who stood that close, who lost the point and didn’t lower his eyes once. Who looked at me like the losing was a thing he was filing away for later. That is worse than if he’d just folded.
My hand slides under the t-shirt.
The cotton lifts and cool air moves over my stomach and I breathe through it. I’m already warm. Already past the point where this is a decision.
His face is the thing I keep landing on. Not the loss. The look underneath it, like he wasn’t conceding so much as deciding the timing wasn’t worth the fight tonight. I hated him for that look an hour ago. My body did not get the memo.
My thumb finds my nipple and my back arches off the mattress before I get it back down.
I press my free hand over my mouth.
The vent.
In my head it isn’t him taking the win back. That’s the part I keep circling. It’s that he wanted me more for beating him, not despite it. A man who respects a fight enough to lose it clean, and looks at the woman who beat him like he’s already planning the next one.
I want to know what that costs him. What it would take to make him show it.
My hips push up. I make them stop.
I think about the moment he stopped briefing me and just said my name. Low. Rough. Nothing managed about it. The sound of a man who’d lost the argument and didn’t care, because some other part of him had already decided what he wanted instead.
My other hand goes lower.
Under the waistband. Under cotton. I am already wet and the first slow drag of my own fingers pulls a sharp breath through my nose that I catch behind my palm.
I think about his voice. The low version. The one underneath the flat one, the one I heard slip out for half a second before he locked it back down.
My fingers move. Slow circles. Tight.
I don’t picture him taking anything from me. I picture keeping every inch I won and him wanting me more for it, his hands shaking a little with how much he’s holding back, my name in that low register because watching me hold my ground undoes him faster than winning ever would.
He’d have to work for it. That’s the thought that won’t let go. An hour after I held the line on Owen’s bedtime and didn’t budge, the idea of him having to earn anything from me at all makes my thighs press together around my own hand.
I want to watch what it costs him to stay patient. His mouth at my ear, the heat of him at my back, both of us strung tight and neither one giving first.
My breath comes apart.
Mara.
Just that. My name in that register.
My fingers curl and my whole body pulls tight. I bite down hard on the heel of my palm to keep the sound inside. My hips push up and stay there.
Every nerve I have fires at once and the ceiling goes white at the edges. I stay there, shaking, through every long pulse of it until it finally lets me go.
I lie still.
Hand still inside the shorts. Other hand still pressed over my mouth. The cotton of the shirt clings where I’ve sweated through it.
My breath is slow to settle.
I take my hand out. Stare at the ceiling.
The feeling doesn’t drain. That’s the part nobody warns you about. The wanting doesn’t go anywhere just because you gave it something.
It just gets quieter. Sits lower. An ember instead of a fire, and embers are worse in some ways because they don’t announce themselves.
I can ignore a fire.
He did this. I don’t know what to do with a man whose restraint is louder than other men’s reach. I resent that I have to find out.
The vent is quiet.
I lie there with the kitchen still in my head, the line of his shoulders, the ground he conceded and the way he made it feel like he was the one choosing.
I think about a man who just threatened to destroy someone through that same baseboard vent, in the same flat certain voice he used to tell me I wasn’t fired.
Same voice. Same register. Like both things were equally decided.
I need to know who Elise is before she knows who I am.